Market conditions have driven companies to leverage employees, partners, suppliers, customers and information to reduce costs. To successfully accomplish this, organizations must efficiently control the way people, resources and information technology interact. This can be referred to as Business Process Management (BPM).
Business processes are used to control costs, to speed production, to increase resource efficiency and to control information that is shared among internal and external participants. Thousands of business processes permeate such areas as engineering, manufacturing, distribution, sales, branding, marketing, advertising, purchasing, corporate communications, legal, customer relations, finance, staffing, payroll, benefits, training, employee records and more.
Most business processes are manual, paper-based systems. Some are managed in software applications. As companies grow, they will generally employ 15 to 100 different software applications, each of which governs its own set of business processes. Applications typically secure information by controlling access, which is done by setting up accounts and then manually entering (typing in) employee information (e.g., names). The applications also control business processes by assigning certain employees to approve certain business processes. Again, this information is manually entered.
When an employee is hired, promoted, transferred or leaves the company, a cascade of manual changes must be made in every affected application. This is illustrated in FIG. 1. Administrators, shown at the bottom of the figure, perform these changes. When a company reorganizes, it can take weeks to make all the necessary changes. Similar changes must be made when the company modifies its business processes or the responsibilities of people within the company.
Most applications capture information necessary to project the outcome and cost of each business process. Companies use Analysts to pull information into spreadsheets and then feed this information into financial and reporting systems. This can delay management access to critical information by days or weeks and often yields erroneous information.
If management finds it necessary to change a specific business process, the people who can access the business process, or the people who approve the process can be changed. This is normally done through e-mails, meetings, and phone calls to functional and departmental heads who determine which employees should be added or deleted from the access and authorization rolls. Typically, when a business process is changed, management gives to system administrators a list of applications that are affected. The system administrators must then type in the new information and delete the old information. This process can take weeks. During this time, employees may or may not know what has changed, and the change has not been completely implemented, so it may be very difficult to enforce the modified business process.
Incredible inefficiencies and hard cash losses can be directly associated with poor business process management. Companies must employ extra people to manage, drive, audit and report on business processes. It is not unusual for new employees to start 30 days before their phones are turned on, for computers to get “lost”, for payroll, credit cards, phones and building access to remain valid after employees terminate, for bureaucracy to build, for employees to become confused and dissatisfied, for management's span of control to become restricted, for the security of information to break down, and more.
Market Landscape. Paper Systems and Simple Applications. In small businesses, the vast majority of business processes are managed on paper systems, although simple applications may be used to manage highly administrative functions like payroll, finance and benefits. Most business processes are either verbal, or forms are filled out and forwarded (by hand or e-mail) to approvers and administrators. In small companies this method is effective and keeps associated costs down.
Workflow Applications. Generally, as companies grow past 250–300 employees, manual business processes break down and the companies begin to purchase specialized workflow applications for business processes involving staffing, HRIS, purchasing, inventory, expense reporting, CRM, sales, etc. These applications are generally available as “shrink wrap” software installed on company hardware (or rented as an application service). Annual costs for each application can range from $50 to $1200 per employee.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). ERP systems (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Baan, Great Plains and others) are first and foremost financial systems. They are designed to seamlessly integrate legacy applications and their own applications into a single financial application. An ERP implementation is an enormous undertaking that integrates all the backend systems and maps and builds business processes. The integration of information has great value, but business processes are “hard-wired” and require administration of access and approval. This results in an extremely rigid system that is like a house of cards that has to be reconstructed every time the something changes.
Signature Looping. Signature looping is the process of identifying people within the company that are involved in a business process, notifying them that their participation is required for a particular process that has been initiated, and possibly obtaining their approvals of the process.
Most competitive systems which are capable of automating signature looping do so by traversing the company's organizational structure directly up the chain of command as illustrated in FIG. 2. The customer defines the number of levels of management that the business process requires and the system will automatically find the requester's superiors and forward information to them. These systems can identify the direct reporting manager, the second level manager and any others up to the CEO, but they cannot identify functional approvers like Finance or HR employees who are not directly above the requester in the organization.
In a small organization, this type of approval may be manageable, but in complex, fast changing or geographically distributed organizations, it becomes very difficult. This difficulty arises from a number of factors. For example, in a larger organization, approval functions may be assigned to a position which, because of the complex organizational structure, is not directly above the requesting position. Further, in most systems, lists of functional approvers are manually maintained for each employee with access to a particular business process.
While some products allow signature looping to be based on the roles of employees rather than simply their positions, these products also normally require manual maintenance of lists which identify specific approvers for specific employees and specific business processes.
A software platform that can bridge business process gaps between people, resources and systems is therefore necessary to increase the amount of information which is available, to increase control and to increase efficiency.